Read “Planning the schecting at the Food Conference - part 1″ here.

Having laid all the burecratic ground work for the shechting, I now needed to actually get my hands on a goat! I didn’t know it, but Hazon was planning to use a goat belonging to ADVA Dairy, run by Aitan Mizrahi, who lives and works at Isabella with the Adamah program. I touched base with Aitan, who told me he has some goats that could be slaughtered, but he was planning on slaughtering them in October. He was fine waiting until December, as long as Hazon covered the extra food the critter would need for those 2 months. Seemed more than fair. We would need a few goats, partly to feed all the people at the Conference at least a taste of goat, but more importantly because there was no guarantee that every goat would be kosher.

Despite everything being done properly, after an animal is shechted, it’s lungs are inspected for sirchot, adhesions, which can render the animal unkosher. In order to try and ensure we’d have at least one usable animal, we arranged to shecht 3.  Our friend at the OU told me we’d have an excellent chance of most if not all being kosher due to their young age. Apparently, animals over a year old are more likely to develop these lung blemishes and the younger they are, the less likely we’d find a disqualifying sircha. Since these goats will be all of 8 months old, much younger than the market usually deals with, we could be confident that we’d have meat to eat.

Animals, check.

The next logical step would seem to be the thing we’ve all been waiting for- a shochet! Can’t have a dance without a DJ. But I wanted to wait on this until the other pieces were in place- I know a few shochtim, so I didn’t think it’d be difficult to get one to the Conference but given all the strenuous conversation over the issue, I didn’t want to put it out there until we farther along in the process. So instead, I addressed how we would get the animal from slaughter to table.

For some reason I was still laboring under a childhood misconception that kosher meat is soaked and salted for 24 hours. When I mentioned this to one of the shochtim, he laughed at me- apparently salting meat that long would render it all but inedible! Salting lasts 30 min and the soaking at least an hour, longer if you want more salt out, but an hour is fine. The only possibility the shochet could come up with as to why the 24 hr time frame had stuck in my head is that the USDA won’t grade meat until it’s been hanging for 24 hrs, but since we certainly don’t need that, we could proceed at our own pace. Until I learned all this, we were thinking we’d need to shecht first thing Friday night and cook it Saturday night! Don’t even ask what we were planning when we were thinking the meat had to be aged for a week before eating! That was my fault- I have been told by several cattle farmers that this was necessary- apparently, it does make the meat much tastier and without it picky folks might not eat, but it is certainly not a requirement.

So we needed enough time to slaughter the animal, skin and gut it, salt and soak it and then cut it up for prep- it didn’t need to be pretty cuts like you’d see in the butcher store. The shochtim I spoke to all assured me this was possible to do Friday and have the meat ready for Shabbos. Great- now we’re dealing with getting all the equipment the shochet would need and securing the shochet- I’m still going to keep that off the blog until it’s set in stone…